Google is tweaking its algorithm to highlight original reporting

Google is changing its search algorithms again and they will now focus more on “original reporting.” In a blog post, the company has detailed how it has made ranking changes to its algorithm in order to highlight original reporting so that such articles would stay visible for a longer period of time. While this new change should be fruitful for journalists who devote time and energy investigating their topics and putting together their articles, one can never be too sure with Google’s algorithms. The company admits that there’s no set definition to describe reporting and thus, its services will keep learning and improving over time to understand the life cycle of a story.

Google’s algorithms go through tons of content that’s published online everyday and the algorithms are said to be made up of numerous unique signals that are said to constantly update and improve. However, Google has over 10,000 raters around the world that contribute to tune the company’s algorithm, help understand the authoritativeness of web pages. Their suggestions and reviews are said to not affect the ranking of specific results they see but it’s apparently applied to improve and assess algorithms to all search results.

“While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we’ve made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting. Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer. This prominence allows users to view the original reporting while also looking at more recent articles alongside it,” Google says in its blog post.